Welcome to Week In Review
From new tools transforming creative work, to campaigns reshaped by automation, we track the biggest shifts at the intersection of AI, media, and marketing. This week, Walmart’s shopping agent comes to ChatGPT, the UK Government backtracks on earlier ‘opt out’ rule for creatives, and half of consumers don’t like brands using GenAI.
Top Stories of the Week
Walmart’s AI Shopping Agent Sparky Comes to ChatGPT
Walmart announced it will let some ChatGPT users order a selection of products without leaving the chatbot’s interface. Walmart partnered with ChatGPT on its agentic ‘Instant Checkout’ feature, however this didn’t perform as expected for the US retailer, an executive told WIRED. Instead, Walmart’s chatbot Sparky will appear in the ChatGPT interface – essentially as a chatbot in a chatbot.
Why it matters: Walmart sales through ChatGPT have, so far, been worse than expected, suggesting agentic commerce might not be taking off amongst consumers in the way brands anticipated. Walmart cited the ability of users to only be able to purchase one item at a time through ‘Instant Checkout’ as a key problem. With the new experience, users can login to Sparky and have their Walmart cart sync for a better shopping experience.
UK Government Backtracks on AI ‘Opt Out’ Rule for Creatives
The UK Government has backtracked on its plan to automatically let creative works be taken by AI companies to train models and give creatives the opportunity to ‘opt out’ of their work being used. When this was announced last year, many famous musicians, artists and actors, criticised the government for not doing enough to protect the sector – which currently brings £124 billion annually to the UK economy.
Why it matters: Despite the government reversing its original ‘opt out’ rule, it doesn’t seem to have a clear idea for next steps to approach the issue of copyrighted works being used by AI companies. The government’s stance remains unclear and the UK’s Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said it “no longer has a preferred option.” Clearly, it will be a challenge to balance the interests of both creatives and AI companies – especially with global pressure to remain ahead with this emerging technology.
Gartner Study: Half of Consumers Prefer Brands That Don’t Use GenAI
Half of consumers said they prefer it when brands don’t use GenAI in their consumer-facing comms, including ads, content, and messaging. The Gartner research surveyed 1500 US consumers, and found that three-in-five consumers often question whether the content they see from brands is real and reliable.
Why it matters: Brands are in full swing using GenAI to boost their outward communications, so it’s interesting that, unsurprisingly, many consumers still have some uncertainty when it comes to AI-generated content. Despite half of consumers saying they would prefer it if brands didn’t use GenAI, the other half either feel ambivalent or don’t mind AI being used.
Quote of the Week
Brands & Agencies
Kingfisher and Google Cloud Partner for Agentic Shopping
Kingfisher, the home improvements company that owns B&Q and Castorama France, announced a multi-year AI partnership with Google Cloud to boost its online shopping experience using agentic AI. The partnership will enable the creation of AI shopping agents on B&Q’s website and conversational search for products.
EasyJet Ditches ‘One Big’ TV Ad for AI Content Engine
The airline EasyJet revealed it’s ditching traditional marketing involving “one big million-pound ad” and instead opting for an AI content engine, according to reports from Marketing Week. This shift helped the airline increase content by 350 percent. A big part of this strategy was having a focus on creator assets that are locally resonant.
L’Oréal Expands Partnership with Nvidia
L’Oréal Groupe announced it is expanding its partnership with AI chipmaker Nvidia to bolster its ‘predictive AI science’ and for the formulation of products. This expansion builds on a pre-existing GenAI-focused relationship, to let marketers render 3D images of products for assets.
Half of Brits Think AI Will Replace Designers, According to Adobe Study
Nearly 50 percent of Brits think AI could replace designers entirely or take over routine design tasks, according to a study from Adobe Express. Unsurprisingly, nearly two-thirds of consumers (64 percent) say good design influences whether they trust a brand or not. Over a third of consumers – across both men (36 percent) and women (37 percent) – are happy with AI-generated branding design as long as it looks professional.
Media
Publishers Face Sharp Traffic Declines YoY
Roughly 30 out of 50 of the US’s biggest news websites saw double digit traffic declines in February compared to last year, according to data from Similarweb. ABC News saw the biggest fall down 64 percent, Newsweek saw a decline of 48 percent, The Independent was down 43 percent. These declines are widely attributed to the use of AI tools to find information over traditional search.
Deceased Actor Val Kilmer to Star as AI-Generated in New Film
The deceased actor Val Kilmer who starred in Top Gun will appear in an upcoming movie as an AI-generated version of himself. Kilmer will appear as a priest in the new film titled ‘As Deep As The Grave’, which is produced by production company First Line Films. The star was set to appear in the film five years ago, but was unable to work due to illness.
Tech
World Launches Agent Verification Tool
World, a company co-founded by Sam Altman, has launched a tool to verify humans behind AI shopping agents. The tech, which has been dubbed ‘proof of human’ tech, aims to verify when a human is behind a shopping agent carrying out purchases, instead of malicious actors committing fraud.
Gamma Adds Image Generation to Rival Canva and Adobe
The AI-powered presentation-making platform Gamma has integrated an image generating tool, Gamma Imagine, into its interface which will let marketers create assets without navigating to a separate tool. The move is widely seen as a bid to rival design platforms like Adobe and Canva.
Topsort Launches AI Ad Management Agent
Topsort, an AI-native retail infrastructure company, has announced the launch of an AI agent called Tomi for ad management. The tool lets teams create and manage ad campaigns using conversational language. The company said that instead of building campaigns incrementally, users can outline their goal and Tomi will generate the campaign configurations.
Court Halts Ban on Perplexity AI Shopping Agents Crawling Amazon
A US Court has halted a ruling stopping AI shopping agents owned by AI search engine Perplexity from crawling the Amazon website. The marketplace giant sued Perplexity last November for allegedly accessing its platform secretly through its AI browser Comet and that Perplexity tried to disguise its AI agent as a human. Amazon claims Perplexity’s AI agent crawling on its platform violated its terms of service, caused security risks for customer data, ruined the customer’s shopping experience and misused Prime benefits.
Multiply Secures $9.5M to Fund Self-Learning Ad Platform
AI media agency Multiply has secured $9.5 million in funding to fuel the development of its ‘self-learning’ advertising platform. The San Francisco company claims this continuous re-invention helps ads improve, rather than decline in effectiveness, over time. Multiply says its customers experience a 770 percent increase in sales meetings and a 300 to 500 percent increase in pipeline.
Startup of the Week
Amsterdam-based company Nebius Group announced on Monday a five-year agreement with Meta Platforms valued at $27 billion to provide more computing power to the company. Nebius is an AI cloud platform for the entire media lifecycle, helping customers run complex models and manage large-scale AI workloads. The platform helps agencies speed up ideation, enables music generation, and ad generation.
Number of the Week
The trial was conducted for the Japanese makeup brand Kao Corporation. The study found that replacing human focus groups with ‘AI Consumer Agents’ dramatically sped up product development.
